Unhelpful websites.

The BBQ Pit
1

This is partly to rant and partly to ask a genuine question…

Anyone know what the ‘sos’ in the “/sos” boot.ini switch actually stands for?

I have found eleventy billion articles on the internet that tell me what it does but not a single one tells me what ‘s’ ‘o’ ‘s’ actually stands for. The reason this is so annoying is that I’m MUCH more likely to remember what the switch does if I know what its letters stand for.

What it does is list the drivers being loaded during boot.

if it wasn’t ‘sos’ and was ‘ldl’ which stood for ‘List Drivers being Loaded’ I’d remember it forever. but because it’s ‘sos’ I am likely to forget it two seconds after I’ve learnt it.

It’s probably something really obvious that relates to listing drivers being loaded but I can’t work it out.

2

Any reason to think it’s not just SOS as in the naval distress call? Sort of a catch-all “help!” switch which displays information needed to fix a borked system?

3

I always assumed the same as Giraffe. SOS means what it means elsewhere - HELP PLEASE!

4

/SOS - Displays the driver names while they are being loaded. Use this switch if Windows NT won’t start up and you think a driver is missing. This option is configured by default on the [VGA] option on the boot menu.
From here. Apparently part of Safe Mode bootup.
,but you already know that. I should read better, shouldn’t I?

5

Okay, let’s see if I can recover some face here…

Well, what it does is displays the driver names - or SHOWS them. So the first letter may refer to show. Show On Startup, perhaps?

Mind you, I agree it’s annoying no one’s ever bothered to write them out…

6

It stands for “Son of Strike”

7

I think I might have been better off not knowing :smiley:

But thanks Crazyhorse, and others.

8

I don’t think Son of Strike is what you’re talking about Lobsang… the SOS described in that blog post is part of the .NET development environment, not the NT bootloader.